The era of jobs is ending

Seriously? They show people on the floor within the first 30 seconds of the video. I guess it’s technically “lights out” if you make people work in the dark, but I meant, and the article implied, production without jobs.

I’m confused about how you’ve characterized factory work. It’s nothing like the factories I’ve been in, so I’m assuming this is an imagined future state? Hope do you propose we get there?

Lots of "it's not X. It's Y."

Bullet points I can forgive, it's a common blog post writing style. But the ranty prose here definitely has a whiff of silicon.

We can fix that. The usual method is war and/or revolution. See Piketty [0] for details.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

> The economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it.

I think this completely ignores the role of government in the economy. By virtue of being born today, you are forced to participate in the economy. The government spends tax dollars in the economy, which it either collects from you, or spends on you, and the voting body has decided that, to some degree, the economy is indeed a charity.

> Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves.

I'd disagree with the first part of that statement. Most people see themselves as good, and therefore see some level of responsibility for helping those that cannot provide for themselves.

> As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.

Again, this ignores that the economy is, at least partially, structured by a government.

sorry i was born disabled, or purposely excluded from the economy due to societal discrimination

> The economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it.

> Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.

The problem that this has run into throughout history has been the existence of those who don't take kindly to rules that appear to be there just to push them aside.

An economy that chooses to exclude the majority of the population as "no longer needed" as so much dystopian AI-true-believer babble these days does is going to lead to some major issues when the excluded decide they don't want to simply be excluded.

Society historically does not help those that the economy leaves behind exclusively out of the goodness of its heart - it also does it for self-preservation.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pWdd6_ZxX8c

You want a world where the streets are safe and clean, not choked with homeless people and corpses thereof. So, this “tough love” bullshit is not going to fly.

The slums of Mumbai are just a taste of what’s to come in America, at this rate.

Billionaires, take heed.

>> The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.

> As an obvious trivial counter-example, plenty of people have jobs doing lawn care for other people who's income also comes from a job.

That's not a counter-example, it's just nit-picking on the phrasing and missing the point: the lawn-care people get their income from "those who do own appreciating assets," just with a middleman or two in between.

What food? You mean ultra processed garbage that will kill you?

A whole shit-ton of people in developed countries would not be happy with that, demonstrated by those:

1) choose not to simply coast on the social safety net, and seek out jobs for status and additional things than those. why do they do those when by historical standards they could be wildly comfortable without the bullshit work?

2) do coast (opting to just go on disability, say) but are generally extremely unhappy about it in ways that frequently cause problems for the rest of the people

3) opt out entirely from the social safety net and chose to try to live on the streets instead, whether for a desire for some sort of freedom or because of poor impulse control caused by addiction or similar (which also frequently leads to problems for the rest of the people)

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

These don't magically appear - people have to create / store / distribute those things, and/or develop the science / engineering to do so.

Who is paying for the food (including delivery or transportation) and various streaming services?

Internet entertainment will be abundant on purpose.

Not sure about quality food.

That's a completely incorrect mischaracterisation of the analogy.

I'm not talking about replacing a block of time with nothing, people will still have 24 hours in the day. My worry is about replacing income with nothing, because most people don't have the power to seize any income that isn't freely available.

The public takes what they're offered and can't have anything that isn't on offer. If the offer of access to food is withdrawn, the public has no recourse.

Not necessarily true. There are non-human bottlenecks to productivity, like energy, land area, available raw materials, etc. You're assuming humans can find ways to meaningfully contribute that do not bump up against any of those constraints. R&D is probably the only area not bottlenecked by one of the above out of the gate, and most humans are ill suited for that line of work.

It's not about the existence of work. It's about decoupling work from access to necessary resources.

Sure but at some point if literally everything tangible and essentially every imaginable commercial service can be done by robots and also designed by AI better than a human, humans are basically relegated to what kind of work? Something like being the exotic dancer or baby factory for a robot factory heir, or maybe a meat sacrifice on a Ukraine-esque battlefield to fight the other group of capital holders.

Has anyone figured out how to avoid everything mysteriously being repriced to account for UBI?

Every basic income trial I come across ends up being GBI rather than UBI. Which UBI trials are you looking at?

> Once humanity gets to the point where they are literally no longer needed to produce value due to automation, the means of production will be - logically - accessible to all who survive. Those who don't have access will die.

And that's the part that the AI optimists in these discussions skip over. They want to talk about this new and glorious AI-infested future, but not mention the holocaust that will happen to get there. For most people, the holocaust is the only relevant part, because they'll be destroyed in it [1]. The glorious future of abundance without work is one they'll never see [2].

[1] Most likely through grinding poverty and deprivation, which is how capitalism does it. Not gas chambers or anything.

[2] That future, like you said, a smaller group. I think eventually it will roughly consist of the nepo babies of some billionaires and a smallish group of Lumon-employees (the cultists, not the severed) who must worship them to survive.